December 17, 2016

New Mexico supports BLM in methane rule fight

New Mexico has joined the fight over the federal government’s regulation of methane releases from oil and gas operations.

This week, New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas and California Attorney General Kamala Harris filed a motion to intervene in the case the industry filed against the federal government.

The Western Energy Alliance and Independent Petroleum Association of America want to overturn the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s rule that regulates the release of methane, or natural gas, from oil and gas operations on federal and tribal lands.

New Mexico and California support the rule.

According to court documents the BLM’s rules will benefit the two states in three ways: generating more annual revenue by cutting natural gas waste, protecting public health from harmful air pollution and reducing the impacts of climate change.

Methane is even more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, the states of Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota have also weighed in—but in support of industry’s request to overturn the rule.

According to the BLM, between 2009 and 2015, about 100,000 oil and gas wells on federal land released about 462 billion cubic feet of natural gas through venting and flaring.

The agency also estimates implementation of the rule could have net benefits of up to $204 million per year.

In New Mexico, the BLM manages 13.5 million acres, which have thousands of oil and natural gas wells.

According to an emailed statement from Balderas’s spokesman, James Hallinan, “It was necessary to intervene to require producers to pay royalties to New Mexico school children from gas that is unnecessarily wasted.”

Over the past few years, scientists—including those from NASA—have been studying a methane “hotspot” in the Four Corners that was spotted via satellite images. After conducting ground and air surveys last year, they identified 250 emitters of methane. They also found that 10 percent of those 250 were responsible for about half the methane emissions in the entire San Juan Basin.

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All week, we look for stories that help New Mexicans better understand what’s happening with water, climate, energy, landscapes and communities around the region. Thursday morning, that news goes out via email.

Ryan Zinke will step down from his post as Interior secretary, President Donald Trump announced Saturday. “Secretary of the Interior @RyanZinke will be leaving the Administration at the end of the year after having served for a period of almost two years,” Trump wrote in a tweet. In a second tweet, Trump said he plans to announce a replacement in the coming days. In a resignation letter obtained by the Associated Press, Zinke attributed his departure to “vicious and politically motivated attacks.”
Zinke, a former Montana congressman and Navy SEAL, oversaw much of the Trump administration’s energy dominance agenda, including the ramp up of public lands oil and gas leasing and the rollback of environmental protections.

Given the fire hose of news from Washington, D.C. every day, New Mexicans can be forgiven if they miss stories about environmental overhauls from the White House and funding mishaps in Congress. But ignorance isn’t bliss when it comes to climate-changing methane emissions, less money for public lands and parks or the intergenerational impacts of mercury exposure.

Wednesday, a U.S. district court judge in California slapped down the U.S. Department of the Interior’s attempts to roll back its own rule aimed at cutting the waste of natural gas, or methane, from wells and pipelines on federal and tribal lands. The Bureau of Land Management’s waste prevention rule limits routine flaring of natural gas from oil wells, calls for industry to modernize leak-detection technology and fix leaks that are found and prohibits venting natural gas directly into the atmosphere, except under certain circumstances.

The Four Corners is at the epicenter of drought in the continental United States, even as conditions in other parts of the Southwest improve. “The Four Corners is getting further and further behind in precipitation,” said Royce Fontenot, senior hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, during a briefing Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Integrated Drought Information System.

All week, we look for stories that help New Mexicans better understand what’s happening with water, climate, energy, landscapes and communities around the region. Thursday morning, that news goes out via email.

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